Shift for Android is the new Angry Birds. Sort of

Move over Angry Birds, your Android crown for Most Addictive Timewaster has been stolen. Shift is a Flash-based platformer/puzzler that’s plenty fun and seriously addictive.

Ok, so Shift can’t be compared to Angry Birds in the sense that it’s not a physics-based pig destroyer. But it can be compared in that it has amazing timewasting powers – we picked it up for a quick ‘five minutes play’. That was an hour and a half ago. It’s pretty darn addictive, trust us.

Shift is a port of a popular desktop-based Flash game developed by Antony Lavelle at Armor Games. As it’s Flash-based it’s limited to Android 2.2 phones and you’ll need to have Flash Player installed.

The object of the game is to guide Subject 32763 out of 55 increasingly difficult levels. So far, so standard platform game. But with a tap of the on-screen shift button your world literally turns upside down. The screen does a 180 flip and the colour of your character inverts; the negative space becomes positive and everything gets flipped on its head.

The demo video below gives you a better idea of the game mechanics, but only hints at the fiendishness to come. It gets seriously annoying later on, trust us.

For a quick feel of how the game works, check out the PC desktop original here, or download the lite version. Shift lite comes with ads and gives you the first 15 levels. The full version is priced at $1.99 which the Android Market converts to around £1.25.

This port of Shift is the work of distributors Handmark and the dev studio Fishing Cactus. We really like what they’ve done here with Shift and hope that they’ll one day port the various sequels that are available from Armor Games.